Tragedy can be a necessary form of life no reform can eliminate.

Evidence

Paul Feyerabend once claimed that classical Greek tragedy was at once “a factual account of social conditions with a criticism of these conditions and the suggestion for an alternative.” But this statement does not allow for the possibility that tragedy (like pain itself ) may be actively lived as a necessary form of life, one that no amount of social reform and individual therapy can eliminate forever. The tragedy of Oedipus does not illustrate “how institutions may paralyze action,” as Feyerabend and others have put it. It shows how the past—whether secular or religious—constitutes agency. An “impossible choice” is a choice between terrible alternatives that have been pre-scripted for one—but it is still possible to choose, and to act on that choice. … By this I do not mean of course that no reform of social arrangements depicted in the play is conceivable (of course it is, although the idea of reform is not equivalent to the secular ideas of historymaking or self-empowerment). I mean simply that Oedipus does act, that he does so in a situation that was not his “responsibility,” and that he can act creatively (to free his city) without aiming at self-empowerment. I mean further that reform cannot do away with pain-not merely because pain is always part of the vicissitudes of life, but because it is intrinsic to . — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 478

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘impossible choice’ is not paralysis but still agency — choice arising from a pre-scripted past — resists a one-line summary and cuts against both Feyerabend’s reading of tragedy and standard liberal ideas of agency as self-empowerment.